File this one in the “O RLY” category. Right-wing pseudo-historian, evangelical minister, and “Beck University” lecturer David Barton is at it again. This time, he’s trying to enlist the help of the Founding Fathers to get “creation science” (an oxymoron if ever one existed) taught in all public schools.
The Founders, after all, were big on creationism, according to Barton. Apparently, they had reviewed the science when they formed this great country and decided that creationism was the way to go in science classrooms. Seventy years before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Twenty years before Darwin was born. Forget Darwin, though, because Thomas Paine was at Galapagos way before Darwin was born and decided it was all bunk.
As far as the Founding Fathers were concerned, they'd already had the entire debate over creation and evolution, and you get Thomas Paine, who is the least religious Founding Father, saying you've got to teach creation science in the classroom. Scientific method demands that.
While it may be true that some very, very primitive form of the creation/evolution debate existed before Darwin, what Barton is claiming is just absurd and a total misuse of historical evidence. What a bunch of men in the 18th century thought about the origin of human life has absolutely nothing to do what we should be teaching in science classes today. Barton knows that. The halfwits who sat next to Barton going “Mmm-hmmm” know that. There was a lot about science the Founders didn’t know, but what kind of an asshat would claim our science curricula should be based on the knowledge of the Founders?
But that’s par for the course for Barton, who claimed in the same interview that the real reason we separated from Great Britain – the reason we never hear about – is because we opposed British slavery. Which, of course, is why slaves were owned by Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and other Founders. Which, of course, is why slavery continued to exist for the better part of a century. Pay no mind to that, though, because Barton the super-historian has looked into the Founders’ souls and gotten to the bottom of everything. Everything you know about the slaves Patrick Henry and George Washington held is part of a liberal conspiracy to make the Founders look like bigots.
It’s called “deconstructionism.” We want to make those Founding Fathers look [like] they’re all racists and bigots and immoral and atheists, and that’s what we teach, and that is not true…Jefferson, in the original Declaration of Independence, wrote in there that we’re separating from Great Britain so we can end slavery. That clause got taken out because Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina didn’t want to end slavery…so you can say that the Founding Fathers were pro-slavery, but only three states really were…that’s why we said we want to separate from Great Britain, so we can end slavery.
As with the preceding historical distortion, this one may have a very, very small kernel of truth. But, in his predictable fashion, Barton has taken historical evidence and blown it up to ridiculous proportions. To take the tabling of the slavery issue leading up to the American Revolution and try to use it as evidence that the real underlying reason we fought to separate from Great Britain was because we wanted to end slavery is laughable. It’s something one might expect to find in fundamentalist Christian homeschooling literature.
And this is what we’re up against. Not people who have different opinions, but people who have different facts altogether. It might be hilarious if we didn’t have large swaths of people buying into the Beck-style historical revisionism espoused by self-proclaimed experts like David Barton.